pnetctl

pnetctl is a Linux command line tool for configuring and listing physical network IDs (pnetids) of devices. The SMC protocol implementation in Linux uses pnetids to determine which network and infiniband devices are attached to the same physical network and, thus, can be used together for SMC connections.

Installation

In order to compile, install, and use pnetctl, you need to have its dependencies available on your system:

• libudev
• libnl
• libnl-genl

You can compile and install pnetctl with the meson build system using the following commands:

• meson builddir
• ninja -C builddir install

Usage

You can run pnetctl with and without command line arguments:

------------------------------------------------------------
Usage:
------------------------------------------------------------
pnetctl                 Print all devices and pnetids
pnetctl <options>       Run commands specified by options
                        (see below)
------------------------------------------------------------
Options:
------------------------------------------------------------
-a <pnetid>             Add pnetid. Requires -n or -i
-r <pnetid>             Remove pnetid
-g <pnetid>             Get devices with pnetid
-f                      Flush pnetids
-n <name>               Specify net device
-i <name>               Specify infiniband or ism device
-p <port>               Specify infiniband port
                        (default: 1)
-v                      Print verbose output
-h                      Print this help

Running pnetctl without command line argument prints all devices and their pnetids found on your system. Command line arguments can be used to add, remove, flush, and get pnetids as well as turning on verbose mode.

Output

If you run pnetctl without command line arguments, it prints out the list of devices and pnetids found on your system. For example, the output could look like this:

====================================================================
Pnetid:          Type:           Name:  Port:  Bus:          Bus-ID:
====================================================================
TESTID
--------------------------------------------------------------------
                   net            eth1          pci     0000:02:00.0
                    ib          mlx5_0      1   pci     0000:03:00.0
--------------------------------------------------------------------
n/a
--------------------------------------------------------------------
                   net            eth0          pci     0000:01:00.0
                   net              lo          n/a              n/a

The pnetid column shows the pnetids found on your system. For each pnetid, you can see the devices with their type, name, port (for ib devices), bus, and bus-ID in the respective columns. The special pnetid n/a is used to display all devices without a pnetid. Supported device types are linux net devices (net) like, e.g., lo or eth0 and infiniband devices (ib) like, e.g., mlx4_1 or mlx5_0. Supported buses are PCI and CCW (on the s390 architecture). The bus-ID is a bus-specific identifier of the device: in case of a PCI device, it is a PCI-ID; for a CCW device, it is a CCW device ID.

Changes

• v0.1:
  • First/initial release.